


Starling Soar

by terriku



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, Gen, Trespasser Spoilers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-09
Updated: 2015-09-22
Packaged: 2018-03-06 19:35:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3146063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/terriku/pseuds/terriku
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Inquisitor through the eyes of her companions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Varric

**Author's Note:**

> Varric finds himself in the company of another hero, and contemplates.

**a portrait.**

Inquisitor Lavellan wore all the grace of her people as easily as she wore the mantle of command. That she was Dalish could never be doubted. It was evident in her smooth gait, in the quiet of her footsteps, in her lopping accent. It was tattooed across her face in a branching tree, tracing sloping cheek bones and splitting her lip with a clean line of white.

She was bright, brighter than anyone had the right to be. White tattoo blooming on her face, bright bright eyes, and pale hair. Her gaze was calm and steady, bright and deep purple. Dreamer eyes, Dorian had said, but she was no dreamer. Her gaze was clear and sharp as glass. Her small face never betrayed emotion. Her voice was soft and swift as river water. She was grounded to the world, in the world. Andraste was no more than a story to her, yet she had the gravity to make all of Thedas believe. When Lavellan walked, people looked up. When Lavellan spoke, people listened. When Lavellan marched, people followed.

And yet, for someone so bright she melted so easily into the shadows. The forest shadows fell on her like freckles, like they were a part of her, like she was part of the forest. She could disappear in half a breath leaving nothing but the wind. Grass parted around her. Like a blade through water, she cut across the land. She drew the bow string back till it kissed her lips, and when she let the arrow fly, it always hit its target.

When she turned to face the sun, Varric almost believed in heroes.

 

**a sculpture.**

She is adamantine, but not. The more time Varric spends with her, the more he sees.

She smiles more than he would have thought, and differently too. Varric remembers Hawke, all bravado and bravery and loud and maybe even a bit crazy. Lavellan is nothing like Hawke, her smile is the smallest thing, quiet, a thin arc of her lips that filled her eyes with gentleness. Hawke smiled freely, but Lavellan only smiles when she means it.

She listens more than Hawke too. Hawke liked to talk, liked to quip and joke. Lavellan listens. Varric sometimes wonders if there is any blood in her veins, of if she is simply a stone construct. She never angers. She listens to anyone and everyone’s words with a small inclination of her head. Hawke would have raged at all the injustices they find, but Lavellan does not. Lavellan listens, considers, thinks.

The listening doesn’t dull her though. Lavellan looks at a scouting unit, or a company of men that salute her. She watches steadily as they turn and they march, ready to bleed and die for her. They will, probably, and she knows it. Lavellan does not hesitate when it comes to decisions. She is always quick, but never rushed. Always decisive, but never vindictive. And she always watches. She stands and the sun behind her head casts an almost-halo. That’s what she is, Varric realizes. An almost-prophet, an almost-Andraste, an almost-god. Adamantine, a perfect smooth statue, beautiful but also frightening in her perfection.

Only, she’s not. Lavellan is not Hawke. Hawke wears her pains and worries on her face. Hawke wears sarcasm and wit as armor, deflecting the world with it. When Hawke hurts, he knows. He doesn’t even think that Lavellan feels the weight of all these decisions, lives that is, until one day when she presses her hand against Bull’s chest. “Stay,” she says, “you need not come.” But the expression on her face says that she will not ask him to come to the Storm Coast, she will not ask him to go. Consideration. The Chargers died honorably, but they died on her command, and suddenly Varric sees. In the firmness of her small hand splayed on Bull’s chest is the weight of a thousand lives, ones already lost and ones that will one day be given.

She is adamantine, but underneath it, Varric sees the girl she must have been before. Kind, gentle, trusting. They are chipping away at her, he thinks. They are carving Lady Inquisitor Lavellan from Cian, chipping away at her girlish heart until there is nothing left.

They have taken her from her nest and they have thrown her from the heights of the world, and. And, she has learned how to fly. She has not only learned to fly, she soars in a hostile sky.

That, he supposes, is a trait she shares with Hawke.

 

 **a sketch**.

Nightfall finds them camping atop a dune, the Hissing Wastes spread around them, and the sky above them. Sand spreads outwards, spiraling and approaching eternity. If Varric had not seen Kirkwall’s chantry go up in red, had not seen Meredith turn into a statue, then maybe this emptiness is what he would imagine hell to look like.

As it stands, he finds it quite peaceful. Contemplative, almost. Except contemplation is not a hobby Varric likes to entertain anymore. Not when they trail towards once-friends, and spirits, vengeance, and burning cities. Instead, he stares across the fire and tries to listen to idle chatter. Cian sits across from him with a dagger and a half-carved hunk of wood. A mabari, he guesses from the blunt of its stance. Firelight catches on the blade. He can guess who it is for too. A certain Commander from a certain country with a certain fondness for a certain breed of dog.

“Another gift for Curly? That must be the fifth one. Starling, tell me, is that how you elves court?”

She looks up, and stops. It is hard to tell in the firelight, but he’s quite certain her ears are going red. Her gaze holds for a moment, before it drops back to the totem. She shaves wood off and feeds it to the fire.

“I am just carving to pass the time, old habits.” Two more strokes, and the mabari’s hind legs emerge from the wood. Varric watches. Two more strokes, and he thinks he might see the beginning of a belly. Cian lifts her head. “I do not want to bore you,” she confesses, “there must be something more interesting.”

“There’s nothing out here starling.”

She smiles. He knows how to recognize it now, after all. “It is not empty, this world is never empty.”

She counts the stars before she turns in. She traces constellations new and old, human and elven, and she tells him. She sets the small carved mabari down at the foot of her bedroll. And, under the desert sky, amidst the shifting dunes, she sleeps soundly. Even after it all she still finds the world beautiful.

Varric marvels at that.

 

 **a story**.

“I liked the Inquisitor,” he says.

“Yes,” Hawke says as she lifts her tankard, pointing one finger at him, “but you didn’t write a book about her.”

“No,” Varric set his tankard down, “no one would believe the stuff I have to say about her anyways.”

“Oh?”

Hawke is smiling her smile, the one that stretches and curls and sets her eyes alight with mischief. There is a question there, also a challenge, maybe. Once Varric would have risen to it. Once, when he knew Hawke didn’t wear sarcasm and mischief as armor, didn’t wield wit as a blade.

Varric thinks of sunshine, of stone, of starlings. He closes his eyes and conjures the Inquisitor. The purple of her eyes, akin in shade to nothing in Thedas. The bright blonde of her hair in a winter wind. The line of her arrow as it flew across the horizon, splitting the world in two. The rightward tilt of her head as she listened. The waters of the Minanter flowing around her ankles. The forests above and around her, shadows falling across her skin with tenderness.

Cian is a collection of images suspended with a title. He cannot put that into ink. Hawke raises her eyebrow at his silence. She waits for Varric to gather his thoughts. Once, she might have goaded him. But that was before she let Varric in, before when she had more than one dwarf, and one motely gang of rejects to call family.

“You acted, and Maker, Hawke, you know right? We got into all sorts of shit – killing slavers and smugglers and stuff.”

“We did.”

“That, that stuff makes for a good story. You want to share it because it seems so impossible. The shit we got into, the shit we started, that was all stuff we _did_. We made our choices, and we had to live with our actions. You can laugh at that stuff.”

There's more. He doesn't say it, but the understanding in Hawke's eyes says she knows too. Even down to the decision to come to the conclave, Cian did not choose. She went because it was asked of her. And that's it, that's the story of the Hearld of Andraste. A Dalish girl, taken from her home and forced upon a gilt throne. A Dalish girl with a power and responsibility she didn’t ask for. A Dalish girl who looked at her Commander with bright eyes. A Dalish girl who saved the world. A Dalish girl who carried all the things the world handed her. A Dalish girl who didn’t return to her clan. There is only one end to this story.

Hawke looks at him, looks at her ale. She lifts the tankard up, a small crooked smile on her lips.

“To the Inquisitor!”

“To the Inquisitor,” Varric mirrors.


	2. Hissrad

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She is so Qunari it hurts.

The first time they meet, she is three arrows from a hillside, lodged in the throats of raiders before he registers her presence. She is the clear glint of pale blonde in the corner of his eye. She disappears only to reappear again perched atop a ledge, arrows streaming straight. The first time they meet, she is a storm hidden in a forest, tightly bound and effortlessly under control.

Iron Bull thinks: _Woah_.  
Hissrad thinks: Dangerous.

Iron Bull lets his eyes wander languidly up and down. He lets his gaze drift in the fight and he admires the way that she slips out of reach and the way she shoots straight through throats and chest. She is small, but small is not weak. He admires the stretch of her thighs, the arc of her arm, smooth muscle. She is not bulky. She is sleek like a deer and wet with rain. She stares back at him from beneath rain soaked hair, flanked on each side by warriors who bear shields almost as large as herself. She stares at him, not up at him, but at him. Straight. Piercing. Iron Bull thinks, that if this woman – girl, warrior, whatever, it is irrelevant really – asks, then he would be willing to follow.

Hissrad looks at her, the quiet and poise of her, and sees not an ounce of fear. It is as if this girl-child has already calculated all that he is, the muscle, the height, the axe, the speed at which he moved, and has already decided that she can beat him. Hissrad agrees, it would be a hard battle but she and her’s would probably come out on top. She’s a quick thinker, and he approves. There is a wary guardedness in her movements that tells Hisrad – she knows any fight would be bloody, that it would be better to not fight at all. He agrees with that too. She’s already started counting bodies, and he approves. But it scares him a little, that such a person holds the banner of a prophet. 

The second time they meet, it is on the same beach, in the same moment except not. The first impression is important, he knows. First impressions reveal so much about a person, about what they _are_. Second impressions tell you who they want to _be_. So he walks to her with swagger, lets his eyes go up and down, and laughs. He lets his voice drawl and drag, half-way between Qunari and Orlesian, and laughs easily.

His accent goes to waste. She recognizes neither. When she speaks, he hears the Free Marches there, a bit of brogue, smoky. Starkhaven, maybe. But that is only an undertone and what is more is the lilt of her tongue. She has a cadence of voice that speaks not of the common tongue, and not of the drum-beat of Qunlat, but the smoothness of elvish. Ah, he thinks. Dalish.

Not that he doesn’t know of course. He can see the marks on her face clearly and she does not hide them. It is only now that he knows she has come straight from her clan and is not a wanderer who’d left years ago. Now he knows for certain and there is power in that. 

They look at each other, they barter. She inevitably recruits them. They shake hands. Her hand is white and small against his own, and when he closes his hand, it is engulfed entirely. Her hand does not shake. She does not falter.

It is something he admires.

*

Haven is not the sort of place Iron Bull would have come. Haven, he suspects, is not the sort of place anyone would come, not willingly anyways. He spends easy weeks amid the chaos of a newly founded organization with no resources. Their supply lines are a mess and their men are-. Well, they are survivors, refugees, left-overs from a great explosion. They are an army without armor, without weapons, and yet every soldier under their banner spends each and every day hacking at each other on frozen hills. Drill after drill after drill. Some, he suspects, do not even have socks. 

Iron Bull watches from his camp outside Haven’s walls and he, despite it all, finds it impressive. The clerics and nobles might scoff at this fledgling organization, but he already knows it will flourish. This kind of devotion does not simply burn out. 

For all that they lack, the Inquisition has one thing: they have a prophet.

Cian, the elf-girl, the prophet, the Herald of Andraste, stands on top of a rock overlooking the frozen lake. The winter wind blows through her hair. She raises her eyes to the sky for a moment before letting out a sigh. The winds quiet, she shifts, turns her head towards the north-east. Her gaze remains on the mountains, at some distant place far beyond.

When the spymaster’s runner comes to summon her for some meeting, she startles. It is so slight that it is almost unnoticeable – just a shadow of wariness and calculation in her eyes, the very same calculation he’d seen before – but he is Ben-Hassrath. He does not miss it, fleeting as it is.

Haven, he is beginning to understand, is not the sort of place she would have come either.

*

Cullen is leading an evacuation. There is an army streaming down the mountains towards them and Cullen is leading an evacuation. Haven is lost, then. He means to ask how, why, where did the path come from? How do they now? Where did the dragon come from? What is the plan, what is the god damned plan? He shoves himself forwards through the throngs of people, ready to demand information from a Commander already swamped in orders. 

He, instead, asks, “Where is the Inquisitor?”

The sharp look on the Commander’s face tells him everything he needs to know.

Bull has half the mind to turn around. Hell, he’s always wanted to fight a dragon. But. But that is not what is needed right now. They are spread so thin. Half the soldiers have only held a weapon for three months. Someone must bring up the rear of the retreat and. And also, he is The Iron Bull, leader of The Bull’s Chargers. They are here for gold, not for glory. His life is not so cheap to be thrown away here. He has half the mind to turn back and grab that stupid elf-child but he does not.

Hissrad stares into the night and sees only the pale torch light of their line as they march forward into the blizzard. The Inquisition is no longer so small to be called fledgling, but he thinks that if they lose their prophet here, it is over. One bright flame snuffed out beneath a dragon’s wing, just another foot note in the odd history of the Chantry.

Hissrad thinks: It is a shame.  
Iron Bull thinks: This is not the end. It cannot be. She will not fall here.

*

Iron Bull cannot rest. He is bone tired and frozen stiff, and yet, he finds that he drifts away from the make-shift camp they’ve set up, away from the warm blazing fires, to stand outside. He stands at the entrance of the small valley the Inquisition has retreated too. There are a few others there too, soldiers on duty and the elven apostate named Solas, and the dwarf named Varric, and the Commander. And him. They stand in silence. They stare into the darkness. The blizzard rages on. They wait.

Against all odds, she appears from the storm. She walks towards them with a limp – injury to her left ribs – and she walks – left arm swinging uselessly, must have been hurt, maybe broken – and she looks up. She sees them for only a moment, only long enough to register the light of the fire, their shapes and. And it is very brief, but he sees a flicker of joy, the smallest smile on her lips. Cian is going to collapse. This thought comes to him as he catalogs her injuries, but the smile, or the ridiculousness of it all, _something_ , keeps him from moving even as she staggers, as her legs give way.

It is Cullen who rushes out first, who opens his arms and catches her just as she stumbles. But it is Iron Bull who carries her back into the camp. He holds her so close to him, as close as possible, hopes that the heat of his body seeps through his thick skin, his clothing and into her bone-white body. 

*

Each time the Inquisition asks, she rises. A small archer-girl from a trampled people. They ask, and they ask, and she steps up, and up and up. She stumbles out of the snow, out of fire, out of inevitable death, stumbles straight back into their camp. After marching and burials and crossing mountains, she stumbles upon a mountain fortress too.

Not a day later, the Inquisition comes calling. Leliana is at the foot of the pile of hay Cian had collapsed into earlier. She rises from the bed she has occupied for only hours, and she stands. She lets Leliana lead her up the stairs, lets Leliana present her to the crowds. Cullen rouses the people, Josephine is ever so eloquent but –

Iron Bull remembers, for a moment, the look in her bright purple eyes as she watched a hawk in flight, as she stared out across the oceans, as the rain pelted her skin, as she stood in Haven looking out across the mountains towards some distant place she could not return.

They offer her a sword, a banner, a title. For a moment the elf-girl looks like she might run away. She does not. The flicker passes, nothing more than a shadow in her eyes, and she reaches out. Cian lifts the sword high and she speaks of duty. The people roar. She lets the sword come down, and when she looks down at the men and women shouting her name, there is a certain stillness in her face that makes her look immaculate.

They look at her and see a Herald, and so, a Herald she becomes. 

He thinks: She is so Qunari, it hurts.

*

“It was the right decision.” She says as they watch the dreadnaught pull away, as they pull away. Her voice is, is not calm, he cannot really call it calm, but it is smooth. Smooth like stone, like hard panels of wood polished bright, like slabs of marble sanded to a sheen. If it hurts, if she thinks even for a moment of Krem and Dalish and Stiches and the others all burning in Venatori flames, she does not show it.

Bull thinks of magic – of ice and lightning and flames – he thinks of it licking the skin and bones of his men and he grimaces. For a moment, he wants to rage and rattle against his own bones. The Chargers, they are his men, and they have died. She made a choice knowing they would die. This is leadership, he knows. This is what leadership means, to have all the choices laid out in front of you, death and doom and choices, and to choose without hesitation. 

I know, _I know_ , he thinks. Iron Bull presses a hand to Cian’s small shoulder, but it is Hissrad who agrees. “It was the right decision.”

Later, he will take her hand in his and smooth away her worries. He is not surprised to find the bloody crescents her own nails have carved into her flesh. He does not say anything.

*

She never again asks him to come to the Storm Coast. The first time she leaves without telling him, he dismisses it. The second time, he takes note. The third time, he knows it is on purpose.

The fourth time, well, he means to see that there is no fourth time. She has her traveling leathers up, and he knows the horsemaster has already prepared four horses. He intercepts her right outside the entrance to Solas’ rotunda. 

“Boss,” he says, “I’m ready.”

She stops, looks at him and his armor, and his sword. He expects her to ignore him, to feign ignorance, to not understand. She does none of these.

Instead, she presses her small hand against his bare chest, as if to stop him. Five fingers splayed out across the wide expanse of his bare chest.

“I cannot ask that of you,” she says in a voice that seems to crack.

She is so young, so bright. She wears the mantle of Inquisitor so easily, almost effortlessly. And yet. And yet, there is a part of him that has never forgotten the little elf-girl staring across the frozen lake. It is nothing more than a memory of Hissrad, but Iron Bull remembers it so vividly. It is a single spark of understanding.

Iron Bull covers her hand with his own, and he clenches. 

“Boss,” he says, “I’m ready.”

He does not say: I am okay. I am better. I am sorry.

*

“You have to keep some for yourself Boss.”

She looks up, empty eyes and she looks so very tired. 

“Hope.” He says, offering the word to her.

Cian smiles and nods, but nothing more.

She is ever the giver. Hissrad knows.


	3. Blackwall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They have switched sides.

She walks through the lake to get to him.

Blackwall sees them approaching, the elf-girl and the elf mage, and the dwarf and the Seeker. The sunlight glints off their armor, and the dwarf walks so heavily, he can hear the planks of the bridge rattling. He sees them all from the corner of his eye but it is the elf-girl who holds his gaze.

She walked through the lake to reach him, and made no sound.

Nothing but the rippling of the water, the smallest of waves against a pebbled shore, gave any hint to her presence. If the others had not been so imposing, she could have snuck up on him. Blackwall has seen enough battles to know she’s dangerous. By all rights he should turn away, he should send the farmers back, should pull his door shut because he’s looking at trouble. And only the Maker knows how much he wants to avoid trouble, only the Maker, please, he prays. But Blackwall does not turn away. He stands and he pretends he does not see them until they arrive.

The entire act is a practice in estimating people. By the time they start speaking to him, he figures he’s got a good handle on who they are. They’re good at heart, fundamentally anyways. The elf-mage is a bit hard to read, and the elf-girl is a mystery to him. He supposes that’s in part because they’re elves. But Blackwall always finds himself looking back to the elf-girl, like a man drawn to an object of power.

It’s when he blocks an arrow from splitting her skull, when he looks down at the small lady he’s just protected from certain death to find her staring back at him calmly, that he knows he’s her man now.

Blackwall looks into her eyes and sees the quiet knowledge there, as sure as sunrise: _I knew you would protect me._

That’s what makes him say yes. There is merit in saving the world, yes, and surely the Inquisition is a great cause, yes, but it is the elf-girl. It is the elf-girl who looks at him as if she sees everything, who looks at him and sees some vestige of honor, some semblance of a protector. There will be danger, and there is ever the chance that he’ll be found out, but.

He sees Blackwall in her eyes. That’s what makes him say yes.

*

She is fleet of foot, stumbling over rocks and ridges as easily as a hare. Look away for just a moment and she disappears into the trees.

Blackwall is surprised the Seeker does not keep her on a leash. Cassandra lets out a snort when he tells her as such.

“As if I can keep her tied up.”

“You could keep an entire army pinned down with just your gaze,” he says and means every word of it.

“You flatter me,” Cassandra says, “but she doesn’t need a babysitter.”

And it is true. The Inquisitor, Cian, does not need a babysitter. She might not even need a bodyguard, despite the fact that she has three. Or four, if one counts the slip of a spirit-demon-boy named Cole. They may worry for her, but Cian has been a hunter for half her life, and Dalish for all of it. She knows how to avoid people. She knows how to hide in plain sight and how to kill a man without making a sound.

But Heralds are not hunters, and so she gets a retinue of bodyguards in shining armor. For a girl raised in the wilderness, she looks surprisingly at ease in the finery Josephine parades her around in. There’s a stiffness in her face though, one that Blackwall recognizes. _She’s becoming bigger than she ever wanted to be_ , he realizes. _Like a lie that's been left to grow_ , a voice in the back of his mind says unbidden.

There are a thousand worshipers at her feet. Skyhold is filled with pilgrims who look at Cian and see an almost-god. They kiss the ground she walks on. They look at her and never, ever see her.

Blackwall resolves to never be that to her. He never talks prim and proper with her, and he always keeps his corner of the stables empty should she need it. He presses his hand to her shoulder, pats her back, rubs her nose. He touches her even as she passes from Herald to Savior to Anointed. He never keeps the grubby hands of villagers and refugees from her, and he never looks away as she presses last rites to rotting corpses. Blackwall, who has spent a long time pretending to be something else, laughs when Cian is sent flying into a lake by one of Sera’s pranks.

It is so easy to lose yourself when you and everyone around you pretend you are something else. Blackwall knows this very well.

He wades into the lake and offers her his hand.

“Thank you,” she says as she takes his hand.

 _Thank you_ , he thinks, _thank you for finding me, for showing me the way, thank you. You saved me._ He thinks this, but does not say it. These are not the words of Blackwall, but some other man who would have no right to speak to the Inquisitor at all.

*

This is the trouble of being around bright people: they make you remember all that you could have been.

He cannot hide behind her shadow. He cannot hide under her banner. He cannot hide anymore.

Blackwall leaves, and knows that she will not forgive him.

*

Josephine bribes three noble houses and blackmails more to set him free. It is a dirty stain on the otherwise clean Inquisition. And it is for him. Not for Blackwall, not for the Wardens, not for anything other than him – the never-Warden, the liar, the betrayer, the shit stealing scum that killed children for gold. He’s a coward, a traitor, a bastard. And yet, the Inquisition comes for him with a vengeance.

He stains them. He stains her. His very presence in her halls taints her. The fact that he is kneeling on the flagstones of Skyhold’s keep instead of the plaza of Val Royeaux is a crime. It is a festering blight upon the dignity of the Inquisition.

So long as he dies—  
So long as he repents—  
_No_ , repentance is not for him.  
So long as she judges him, sentences him, kills him—

But no sentence falls upon his head. Only her words, and her eyes, and finally, his pardon. It is the heaviest yoke to carry, that of forgiveness. Harder still because he, the-man-that-was-once-Blackwall, has no desire to carry it.

_“Become the man you wanted to be. Atone as that man.”_

Empty words. He wants to be dead. He wants to be dead, and gone, and hated and vilified. He wants to be seen for who he is. He wants to be dead. He wants to stop hiding behind the Inquisition. He wants—

He wants so much.

*

“I could have sent you to the Wardens,” she says, staring out across the walls.

“You should have.” He says, because he is still bitter. He deserved punishment as much as any other that knelt at her throne and yet he walks freely still. Because he is dear to her? Because he yet possesses some worth? Because she cannot bear to sentence a friend? He does not know which alternative is worse.

She turns to look up at him and she looks older by years since he last saw her. Dark circles beneath her eyes, a wary and rigid tiredness in her shoulders, and the hard line of her mouth. It is the cost his betrayal has wrung from her. Sleepless nights and uneasy dreams and bitter anger. She learned what betrayal was at his hands. The realization hits him like a punch to the stomach. There’s a grimace on her face, like he’s twisted a knife into her gut, and the man who was once called Blackwall feels guilt. But her hurt lances his raw and festering wound until all his anger comes pouring out.

“You’ve wasted Inquisition resources to get me back, you’ve sullied Josephine, now everyone will know you Inquisition is corrupt. You’ve –“

“I know!” She screams for the first time in the time that he’s known her. She cuts him off without mercy, like a claymore through flesh, and all his words and anger fall away.

“I know,” she repeats as she turns away from him.

The man-who-was-once-Blackwall stares too, but he cannot be sure what she sees in the distance.

*

In the end, he is the one who cuts the arm off.

It is an act of necessity. Iron Bull would have done it but The Iron Bull was dead. Cassandra would have done it, if it came down to that, but she does not want to. She does not want to part her friend from her hand, her charge, the innocent she’d dragged into these long years of turmoil, she does not want to hurt Cian anymore. The mages cannot, for they must keep her alive. And the rogues are good with daggers but not the sort of weapon that could sever bone in one stroke.

So it falls to him. Him, the liar, the never-Warden, the betrayer, the forgiven.

Once she looked Blackwall in the eye and told him that she would give him the chance to be what he wanted to be.

It is not Blackwall who holds the axe.

Thom Rainer looks at her. Cian looks so small curled into herself, sweating, clawing at a blackened limb that will never heal. It is spreading. Vivienne and Dorian are two of the strongest mages he knows, but even so they cannot stop it. Solas might have. Solas could have. Solas is not here anymore. He makes a stiff nod that she barely returns and then, Sera is at her side pushing cloth to her mouth. Cassandra holds her down. Dorian and Vivienne hoover, ready to stem the bleeding as soon as it starts. Cole tithers, whispers elven songs into her ear. Varric holds down her other arm, to keep her from thrashing.

Thom Rainer raises his axe.

Once, she might have been a great hunter. She could have been the fiercest archer in the land. Once she might have hunted for her clan or for her friends, or simply for herself. Once she might have gripped a bow between her hands and passed it on to others. To the youngsters, or even her own children.

But no longer.

The axe comes down in a single stroke and cuts through skin and flesh and sinew and bone and dreams and futures with a clean cleave. She screams. She screams until there is no air left in her lungs and everyone shudders as the sound finally passes from her.

The severed limb crumbles to ash and she passes out, limp and damp as a rag. Thom Rainer steps back and allows Cassandra to carry her back. The Seeker insists upon it, and without The Iron Bull there is no one else to challenge her. They file in behind the Seeker, following Cassandra through those blasted elf-mirrors back to the Winter Palace. Thom Rainer is not trusted enough to bring up the back, but he and Sera are the last ones. Behind them, the eluvians die off – forever sundered much like Cian’s bow hand.

He thinks she would have preferred to die than to lose her hand and never hold a bow again.  
He thinks she would have preferred to die than to ever lose her independence.  
He thinks she would have preferred to die.

But the man that was forgiven, who was given another chance to become the man he wanted to be – that man cannot stand aside and let his friend die.

Thom Rainer cuts her hand off.

He is prepared to be hated for the rest of his life.

 _It would be just_ , he thinks.

*

The no-longer-Inquisitor spends a long time in bed after that. She is broken, he thinks, and he has broken her. Without the hand that defined her, without the Inquisition that she gave everything for, without the bow that was her soul, there is little left to Cian.

He has broken her, but she will live.

She will live as surely as she sleeps. In the darkness of Skyhold, Thom Rainer holds a constant vigil at her side. The others allow him – for they are busy with their other duties. Even Cullen cannot be by her side at every moment. He daps sweat from her brow and watches as she twists and turns and thrashes in her sleep. Sometimes she screams, sometimes she cries, sometimes she speaks in Elvhen so low and quiet, he cannot hear.

It is not until the sixth day that she speaks to him.

“Why,” she asks in the darkness, voice dry and cracked.

Thom brings a cup of cold water to her lips but she turns away.

“I would have rather died.”

“I know,” he says and he pushes the water to her again and this time she drinks.

She takes a sip and he watches it travel down her throat. Not enough. If it were Cullen by her bedside or Cassandra or anyone else, they might have forced more down her throat. But Thom Rainer understands. And so he puts the cup back down and waits.

Cian does not look at him. She stares up into the ceiling.

“I was a hunter before I even had a name, the Keeper said it would be so.” She traces her vallalsin with her remaining hand. It seems a broken gesture, but Thom Rainer does not say this. “What am I,” she asks, “without my bow?”

“Just Cian,” he whispers.

“I don’t know how to be just Cian without a bow.” Or without Elrian, or without the Inquisition, or without The Iron Bull damned traitor that he was. He knows this is what she means to say, but Thom Rainer simply puts his hand on her’s.

“You will learn how to live again.” _As I have_ , he thinks but does not say.

She turns over in the bed and he rises to pull the blankets tighter around her.


End file.
